New Class of Galaxy Discovered

fructose sends along this excerpt from Space Daily: "A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the 'Green Peas' with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. ... Of the 1 million galaxies in Galaxy Zoo's image bank, only about 250 are in the new 'Green Pea' type. Galaxy Zoo is claiming this as a success of the 'citizen scientist' effort that they spearheaded. ... The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way. 'They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders. 'These galaxies would have been normal in the early universe, but we just don't see such active galaxies today. Understanding the Green Peas may tell us something about how stars were formed in the early universe and how galaxies evolve.'"

Comments

Re:so do they exist in their current form?

[Ukab the Great]

If you'd patiently wait 5 billion more years, you'd know the answer.

Time to be pendantic!

[kimvette]

"10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive"

10 times smaller?
100 times less massive?

Isn't it 1/10 the size and 1/100 the mass?

In order to be "10 times smaller than $foo" or "100 times less massive than $foo" doesn't there need to be another point of reference?

I know I'm picking nits, but this is slashdot. People should know better. This bugs me like less vs. fewer, there/their/they're, your/you're, and so forth. I understand it is simply a colloquialism arising from poor grammar among the masses, but in the case of a scientific article, poor writing makes it more difficult to take the writer seriously.

Oh, another expansion pack

[The_mad_linguist]

Great, another overpriced expansion pack. I guess sales from the last time they added a class have dropped, so astronomers are making new areas and classes rather than trying to balance the existing content.

NERF ANDROMEDA!

Peas were user discovery

[cayle clark]

I've spent a lot of hours classifying galaxies at GalaxyZoo. The abstract sense of making a tiny contribution to research gets thin real fast. What keeps me coming back is the surprise factor. You'll click away sorting boring balls and streaks and then up pops a perfect barred-spiral, or a swooshy collision or an oddity that doesn't fit any of the categories, and wakes you up. There are millions of galaxies in the deep-field surveys that are the source, most of them never looked at individually, and you never know what the software will toss up next.

The site has an active and supportive forum community, and it was in the forums that the users -- not the astronomy post-docs who run the site -- first commented on the little green balls, suggested they might represent a unique class, and started collecting them as posts on a thread. There are user-run threads going on for other odd types of galaxy some of which might ultimately turn into research topics as well.